The Police Discipline Appeals Process in California
Jeffrey Selbin, Stephanie Campos-Bui & Jacob Goldenberg
Following renewed focus on police misconduct involving the high-profile deaths of African American civilians, police accountability advocates have sought to strengthen civilian oversight bodies. However, surprisingly little is known about what happens after such bodies decide to discipline a police officer. Final outcomes in police discipline cases bear directly on issues of law enforcement accountability and legitimacy.
This paper describes findings about the disciplinary appeals process in cases of alleged police officer misconduct in California. Although officers can appeal discipline imposed by internal affairs units, we studied appeals from decisions of civilian review boards. California law guarantees police officers the right to appeal any order of discipline to a neutral body, which can modify or reverse the findings of a civilian board.
Symposium Presentation
A Statewide Analysis of Police Misconduct Charges in Arizona, 2000-2011
Jessica Huff, Scott Decker & Michael White
Nearly all examinations of police officer misconduct involve case study methodologies applied to one or a few agencies. Perhaps the best example of this point is Kane and White's (2009, 2013) study of "bad cops" in the NYPD, which examined all NYPD officers fired for cause from 1975-1996. There are few examinations of police misconduct across multiple agencies, and virtually no studies of police misconduct at the state level. This case study approach has advanced our understanding of the causes and correlates of misconduct at the individual officer level, but it has severely limited our knowledge of the role of department-level features in determining rates of misconduct. As a consequence, we have little evidence regarding the prevalence and types of misconduct across law enforcement agencies, as well as how department-level characteristics might serve to protect agencies against disproportionate rates of officer misbehavior (or alternatively, put agencies at risk for elevated rates). The current study addresses this research gap through an examination of over 1,500 charges of police misconduct filed with the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board (AZPOST) from 2000-2011. AZPOST serves over ten-thousand officers from more than one-hundred municipal, county, state, tribal, and other law enforcement agencies in the state of Arizona. The authors use this statewide dataset to explore variation in the prevalence and forms of police misconduct across agencies based on agency size, type, and geography. This statewide analysis facilitates a discussion of the organizational features of agencies that experience disproportionately low and high levels of accusations of officer misconduct.